Monk

"We’ve got to make sure that we are not the party of big business, big banks, big Wall Street bailouts, big corporate loopholes, big anything. We cannot be, we must not be, the party that simply protects the rich so they get to keep their toys... It is no secret we had a number of Republicans damage our brand this year with offensive, bizarre comments — enough of that. It’s not going to be the last time anyone says something stupid within our party, but it can’t be tolerated within our party. We’ve also had enough of this dumbed-down conservatism. We need to stop being simplistic, we need to trust the intelligence of the American people and we need to stop insulting the intelligence of the voters."

-- Governor Bobby Jindal

There has been quite a bit of this kind of talk since the Republicans lost big in the presidential election, but will we see anything of this philosophical evolution in the next couple of years?

Newly-discovered audio from a conference call in June captures Mitt Romney asking business owners to urge their employees to vote for him.

Romney, speaking on a call to the very conservative National Federation of Independent Business, tells a group of business owners that they should “make it very clear” how they feel about the candidates. The audio, discovered by In These Times, also captures Romney telling the business owners to “pass… along to your employees” how their jobs might be affected by who wins in November.

-- News-LJ

If you thought the Republicans might feel some pressure to get nasty in the closing weeks of the campaign, well, you were only thinking the obvious, and the Grand Old Party has not failed to live down to our expectations.


_ _ _

For a while now, pictures purporting to show Obama’s mother, Stanley Ann Dunham, modeling in 1950s bondage and fetish porn have been floating around the darker corners of the Internet. Now, though, they’ve made their way into a pseudo-documentary, Joel Gilbert’s Dreams from my Real Father, which is being mailed to voters in swing states, promoted by several Tea Party groups and by at least one high-level Republican. At the same time, Dinesh D’Souza’s latest book, Obama’s America—the first of all his works to hit the top spot on The New York Times bestseller list—has a chapter essentially calling Dunham a fat slut. If Obama is reelected, it’s hard to imagine where the right goes from here.

It’s tempting to ignore Dreams from my Real Father because it’s so preposterous. The movie claims that Obama’s actual father was the poet and left-wing activist Frank Marshall Davis, who Dunham met through her father, who was a CIA agent merely posing as a furniture salesman. “My election was not a sudden political phenomenon,” says the narrator, speaking as if he were Obama reading his autobiography. “It was the culmination of an American socialist movement that my real father, Frank Marshall Davis, nurtured in Chicago and Hawaii, and has been quietly infiltrating the U.S. economy, universities, and media for decades.”

Davis enjoyed taking nude photos of women, and the images said to be of Dunham, to which the director pays lascivious attention, are presented as evidence of their intimate relationship. “These photos were taken a few weeks before 1960, when Mom was about five weeks pregnant with me,” the narrator says. “Frank then sold the photos to men’s mail-order catalogs.”

What matters here is not that a lone crank made a vulgar conspiracy video, one that outdoes even birther propaganda in its lunacy and bad taste. It’s that the video is finding an audience on the right. Gilbert claims that more than a million copies of Dreams from my Real Father have been mailed to voters in Ohio, as well between 80,000 and 100,000 to voters in Nevada and 100,000 to voters in New Hampshire. “We’re putting plans in place, as of next week, to send out another 2 [million] or 3 million, just state by state,” he told me.

Gilbert won’t say who is funding this distribution, and there’s no way to verify his numbers. Had he not made other right-wing documentaries in the past, I might suspect that the whole thing is a brilliant conceptual art project about the limits of anti-Obama credulity. But the fact is, people are reporting receiving the disc in the mail. Tea Party groups and conservative churches are screening it. It was shown at a right-wing film festival in Tampa during the Republican National Convention, and by Phyllis Schlafly’s Eagle Forum Council in Missouri. Alabama GOP Chairman Bill Armistead recently recommended it during a speech, saying, “I’ve seen it. I verified that it is factual, all of it. People can determine.”

-- Michelle Goldberg at The Daily Beast

David Brooks gives us a nice discussion on the recent history of Republican politics, laying out a case for what could be seen as its cracking up at this point. He argues that there used to be two strands of conservative thought between traditionalists and the market conservatives, that is, between those who saw an importance in communitarian politics and in tending to the general welfare of the nation as a whole as against those for whom libertarian thought dominated. He notes how the market conservatives won out, practically obliterating the communitarian conservatives, and thus alienating most Americans, since most Americans don't have the money and wealth that would make libertarian/Any Rand politics that attractive.

Of course, in so far as these communitarian conservatives also tended to push narrow, intolerant Christian ideas, it is perhaps not altogether bad that they have been weakened. On the other hand, it may be fair to say that there is at least one way in which our market conservatives have striven to stay in touch with the larger American population and the communitarian Republicans of old, and that is by pursuing stringent anti-abortion politics, which we might consider to be about the worst part of the old communitarian Republicans.

What Republicans have really been banking on, though, is the racial prejudice of poor, white Americans. In spite of their Wall Street policy program, Republicans have been counting on winning majorities by virtue of being the White Party with the Democrats being the Darkie Party, buttressed with some of that old fashion superstition by also being the Christian Party as opposed to the secular Democrats - hence the Republicans are the real Americans and the real patriots, while the Democrats are rather alien and even anti-American (a point further enhanced by having a black Democatic president named Barack Hussein Obama).

The main problem is that the Romney gang have been so blatantly plutocratic and thick-headed that they have been dropping a lot of support, despite their handy racism and faux-Chistianity.

Paul Krugman offers a quick and dirty assesment of our political situation that is enouraging if you are Democratic and liberal. I'm just afraid that he counts too much on the rationality of people.

_ _ _

Mitt Romney is catching a lot of flack from his own side now, which seems premature; although the odds are now against him, this is by no means over. But let me say that even if he does spend election night weeping in his car elevator, his critics from the right are being unfair. Yes, he’s a pretty bad candidate — but the core problem is with his party, not with him.

[...]

First of all, that old standby, national security, isn’t working; between Bush’s Iraq debacle and the fact that Obama was the one who got Bin Laden, the notion that only the GOP will defend America is dead for the foreseeable future. And at this point social issues are cutting the wrong way: there are almost surely more affluent women who will vote against the party of Todd Akin than there are white working-class voters who will punish the Dems for gay marriage.

And underlying it all is the diminishing whiteness of the American electorate.

This still might be a close election thanks to the weakness of the economy, and a better candidate than Romney might have had a better chance of pulling it off. But the long-term fundamentals are not good for Republicans.

-- Paul Krugman at The New York Times

"If you can't beat Barack Obama with this record, then shut down the Party! Shut it down! Start new! With new people."

-- Laura Ingraham

Going through last night's taped news shows, I am surprised to see that the Republicans seem to be a little nervous. After both conventions, Obama has apparently garnered a five-point lead in the polls. Now, five points in the middle of September is not an irrecoverable catastrophe, but considering the state of the economy, I suppose it can be dumbfounding why their man is only falling further behind.

Um, maybe they should have considered running a moderate rather than an ideologue, but of course the Republican base, including people like Laura Ingraham, would not tolerate anything less than a fire-breathing, gung-ho 'conservative' - promising even more tax cuts for the rich, maybe an extra Mideast war or two, as well as promising to take an axe to what little safety net this country has put up.

But, yeah, it would probably be healthy for America if they did shut down the Republican Party. They have surely ruined whatever good investment Abraham Lincoln and Theodore Roosevelt put into it. This is not to say that a genuine conservatism does not have a place in this country, but today's Republicans are not it.

The big, if-not-quite-articulated, message in Tampa was that in a free economy, everybody will get what they deserve. There is no need to worry about the vast, growing gap between the richest and the rest, or the shrinking middle class, or the fact that America currently has one of the worst rates of social mobility in the developed world.

Untrammeled, the business sector will create plenty of jobs, and the hard-working big-dreamers will jump in, amass wealth and achieve success. You cut taxes, reduce regulation and let the magic happen. It’s that or what Paul Ryan called “a dull adventureless journey from one entitlement to the next, a government-planned life, a country where everything is free but us.”

-- Gail Collins at The New York Times

Surveying the flood damage produced by Hurricane Isaac, newly minted Republican nominee Mitt Romney on Friday told Gov. Bobby Jindal that he had come to Louisiana to learn -- and then asked where all the water came from.

-- News/LJ

It's amazing how much more he is looking like Dubya all the time, and I used to think that at least Mitt was a smart guy, not a genius, but smart, smarter than Dubya at least, but, no, I think I was mistaken.

The Repubicans have wrapped up their convention and Romney has given his big speech, but I'm going to let Paul Krugman take his swing at Paul Ryan and his speech.

We really are seeing an historic move: the Republicans have fully taken politics into the post-truth, post-modern realm - a real Alice in Wonderland, Newspeak kind of world. I kind of wish that I was in my seventies lying in my death bed, because I have this heavy feeling that life in this country is going to get really ugly in the years ahead.


_ _ _

Paul Ryan’s speech Wednesday night may have accomplished one good thing: It finally may have dispelled the myth that he is a Serious, Honest Conservative. Indeed, Mr. Ryan’s brazen dishonesty left even his critics breathless.

Some of his fibs were trivial but telling, like his suggestion that President Obama is responsible for a closed auto plant in his hometown, even though the plant closed before Mr. Obama took office. Others were infuriating, like his sanctimonious declaration that “the truest measure of any society is how it treats those who cannot defend or care for themselves.” This from a man proposing savage cuts in Medicaid, which would cause tens of millions of vulnerable Americans to lose health coverage.

And Mr. Ryan — who has proposed $4.3 trillion in tax cuts over the next decade, versus only about $1.7 trillion in specific spending cuts — is still posing as a deficit hawk.

But Mr. Ryan’s big lie — and, yes, it deserves that designation — was his claim that “a Romney-Ryan administration will protect and strengthen Medicare.” Actually, it would kill the program.

[...]

The question now is whether voters will understand what’s really going on (which depends to a large extent on whether the news media do their jobs). Mr. Ryan and his party are betting that they can bluster their way through this, pretending that they are the real defenders of Medicare even as they work to kill it. Will they get away with it?

-- Paul Krugman at The New York Times

The Republicans are having their big convention in Florida this week, if the hurricane does not throw things too wildly out of whack for them. Apparently there is a stripper in Tampa who is doing a Sarah Palin act. I think I'd like to see that and get a good feel. Meanwhile, Maureen Dowd continues to lament the seduction of Mitt Romney, "Even though he once seemed to have sensible, moderate managerial instincts, he won’t stop ingratiating himself with the neo-Neanderthals."

This is a familiar line in discussions about Romney. He has a remarkably moderate record, even somewhat liberal, especially when he was the governor of Massachusetts. However, considering the larger arc of his Bain vulture-capitalist type of life, I am afraid that it is his moderate side that was the politically expedient act, even when it comes to the religious social issues. I mean, the man is a devout Moromon, which is rather cultish, like Scientology but with fewer celebrities. No, I don't think he is ingratiating himself with neo-Neanderthals. I think he is a Neanderthal.

(Source: Maureen Down at The New York Times)